What are Practical Experience Supervisors?

Please note that the information in this section is only for applications for our Trainee Development stream.

Supporting your ACCA trainees

All ACCA trainees must be supported by a Practical Experience Supervisor (PES) to oversee their achievement of the performance objectives. You will be asked to provide details for the individual in your company who will act as PES for your ACCA trainees (or the individual with overall responsibility for overseeing the practical experience of trainees if you have more than one PES within your company).

A PES should be a qualified accountant recognised by law in your country and/or a member of an IFAC body and must have knowledge of ACCA’s PER/FPER requirements.

We will contact your nominated PES as part of the application process, sending them a standard questionnaire to complete electronically. They will be asked to provide details and/or evidence of their qualifications when they complete the questionnaire.

PES verification

Your nominated Practical Experience Supervisor (PES) will need to complete the verification form that we will send to them by email at the address you provide in your application.

The form will ask them to verify that they are qualified to act as a Practical Experience Supervisor, and to commit to supporting ACCA trainees working for your organisation. We may also need to ask your PES to provide us with evidence of their professional qualification.

Your PES will be asked to identify the roles in your organisation where ACCA trainees can meet ACCA’s performance objectives. You will need to demonstrate that ACCA trainees can achieve a minimum of four Technical performance objectives while working with your organisation. This could be in a single role, or across a number of different roles including job rotations.

We will also ask your PES to provide evidence of the type of activities trainees carry out in these roles to meet the performance objectives they have identified.

We offer two different ways to provide this evidence:

  1. documentary evidence, such as job descriptions or examples of work objectives detailing the relevant activities
  2. written statements describing the relevant activities

You can choose the type of evidence you want to provide for different performance objectives.

For further information on ACCA’s performance objectives, visit our Students' section.